We tortured the cows. We sliced apples and slipped them onto the electric fence that contained them in the newer parts of the pasture. Cows like apples and they kept trying.

We could play in the attic...It was a thrilling place during a thunderstorm and, like the hay loft of the barn, a place where my pre-adolescent sexuality concerning my cousin Judy, who was one month my senior, would come a little more sharply into focus. We were only nine or ten, but it was there already with its pressing curiosity. We sometimes kissed.

I was driving with Jennifer Barnett to a cabin I had been building in northern California. She and I had worked and lived together for two years. She was an inspiration to me during that time as only a woman with brains, in the bloom of her womanhood, can be. That morning she had no idea what had just happened. ...It was the first day of the rest of my life.